The project repositions Hermann Obrist in the debate around the Jugendstil and Lebensreform (life reform) movements, and provides insight into the pioneering role that his unique body of work played in terms of the history of both art and the media. Obrist's oeuvre is an example of the crossing of borders between free and applied art. The project critically re-reads his artistic achievements and his contribution at the intersections between historicism, Jugendstil and modernism.
The oeuvre of the Swiss artist Hermann Obrist (1863–1927) represents one of the most significant contributions to art in the fin de siècle period. In the pulsating Munich art scene at the end of the nineteenth century, Obrist played an authoritative role in the development of a German Jugendstil. Building on the crafts traditions of historicism, the new movement tried to bring about a transformation of arts and crafts and an amalgamation of the various arts. As a result of the many and varied domains of his creative activities – embroidery and furniture designs, sculptures – and the paucity of source material available, prior to this project there was no comprehensive monograph on the artist, and the only list of his works had to be regarded as incomplete.
The project focuses is on the three-dimensional work of Hermann Obrist, which represents one of the most important Swiss contributions to the Europe-wide Jugendstil movement and the subsequent debate on sculpture and architecture. This project is the first attempt at a comprehensive examination of the associated spatial discourse and debate with the new role accorded to recipients, with the resulting aesthetic paradigm shift, at least from the perspective of the Munich Jugendstil circle. It represents a response to the lively interest again seen in recent years in multi-genre "architectural sculptures" and their relationship to a close-to-nature outdoor space, in the context of Land Art and landscape architecture. The project demonstrates that categories that were central for Obrist – "three-dimensional art", "architectural sculpture" or the "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk) – proved highly fruitful for art in the years around 1900 and subsequent developments.
Starting from an analysis of an extensive corpus of reproduction photographs, the research project makes a real contribution not only to the history of sculptural art since 1900, with particular regard to the blurring of genre boundaries, but also to the history of media culture. To this end, the important role of photography in the communication and reception of three-dimensional art works and particularly those tied to a given location is highlighted, as an example drawn from German-speaking countries. The considerable weight that Obrist placed on both text and image in the dissemination of his ideas and visions raises some issues of wider general significance.
The project re-positions Hermann Obrist in the Jugendstil and Lebensreform debate, and provides insight into the pioneering role played by his unique body of work. Recent research has highlighted the integral links between the artistic movement of the fin de siècle period and the activities of the Lebensreform movement. Obrist's oeuvre provides a clear example of the ways in which large-scale artistic genres (sculptures) can grow from small forms (embroidery), and how the boundaries between free and applied art are crossed and blurred: it can be read overall as a reform project formulated in sketches, models, texts and three-dimensional artistic works.